Lot's Wife
...his big leather armchair, my father sipping his bourbon and staring out at the backyard.” The husband and daughter are dealing with things by smoking pot and drinking, living in a nonexistence, while the mother is dying in her bedroom. Their family life as they know it is pretty much destroyed. In comparison, Anna Ahkmatova finds similar meaning in the destroyed city of Sodom. She writes that Lot’s wife looks back on the “bitter view”. She refers to it this way because Lot’s wife has found all of her happy memories in that city of Sodom. When she looks back and sees that it has been destroyed, to her this symbolizes her destroyed life. Ahkmatova writes “Look back, it’s not too late for a last sight of the red towers of your native Sodom, the square where you once sang, the gardens you shall mourn and the tall house with empty windows where you loved your husband and your babes were born”. These are all happy memories of hers that she sees in the destroyed in that city of Sodom. Both writers find meaning in the physical pain of dying because it symbolizes the mother and Lot’s wife having to leave behind the lives that they love. Amy Bloom writes “In a barren landscape was a shrouded figure.” “Or it could have just been the upright shroud itself, or a woman in a full-length muslin wrap.” “But the body was no longer alive; it had set into something dense and immobile.” This is symbolic of the mother’s disease that has turned her into a “shrouded figure”. She too feels, no longer alive and dense and immobile because she can’t live a normal life with her family anymore and she also cannot paint and express herself in this, the hardest time of her life. In “Lot’s Wife” Anna Ahkmatova writes “Her eyes were welded shut by mortal pain; into transparent salt her body grew, and her quick feet were rooted in the plain”. Lot’s wife knew when she made the decision to look back on the life that she loved that she would lose her life by doing so. Amy Bloom and Anna Ahkmatova both use the story of Lot’s Wife and the symbolism behind it to make strong points about their characters to their readers. In “Hold Tight” Amy Bloom writes a passage of the Mother and daughter having a conversation about her painting “Lot’s Wife”. “It’s so sad”, I complained to my mother.” “Is it?” “Look again, the sky is so full and there is so much happening.” The mother uses her painting and the meaning of the s...